On 11 September, 2001, nineteen young men—fifteen from Saudi Arabia,
two from the United Arab Emirates, and one each from Egypt and Lebanon—seized control of four large commercial airliners departing from Boston, Newark, and Washington, DC. At 8.47 a.m., mission leader Mohamed
Atta piloted American Airlines flight No. 11 into the North Tower of
Manhattan's World Trade Center (WTC), and at 9.05 a.m., with the world's
television cameras now trained on the site, a second group barrelled United
Airlines flight No. 175 into the South Tower. Finally, after a third suicide
squad had crashed American Airlines flight No. 77 into the Pentagon at 9.39
a.m., the fourth team, under assault by a group of passengers, ditched United
Airlines flight No. 93 into the Pennsylvania countryside at 10.03 a.m. These
transcontinental flights were apparently selected because of the negligible
number of passengers likely to be on board at the time and the 10,000 gallons
of aviation fuel that, upon impact, transformed the planes into immense
incendiary bombs. At the WTC, the hydrocarbon fires caused by the burning
fuel overcame flimsy fireproofing and, after a very short time, brought the
massive skyscrapers crashing down, killing close to 2,750 people; 198 more
were killed in the Pentagon attack. Although suicide terrorists had been
loading vehicles with explosives and ramming them into buildings for decades, this was the first time that hijacked airplanes had been successfully
deployed for such an assault. The political after-effects have been so massive
that we can, without much exaggeration, describe 9/11 as the suicide mission
(SM) that shook the world.

We know that passengers on some of the flights were lulled into passivity
by being informed that the aircraft were returning to the airports. We also
know that the hijackers murdered some pilots and members of the crew
before impact, probably by slitting their throats. But except for a few
cellphone conversations, mostly from United Airlines flight No. 93, little
direct evidence informs us about what actually happened on board. Common
sense, however, supplemented by the massive inquiries made after the fact,
supports one elementary proposition, namely, that this was a carefully

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